The House Was Creepy—Clark Humphrey

The house was creepy and quiet that night. It was the first, and was supposed to be the only, house anywhere near it. But as the McMansions popped up where corn and lawn sod had once grown, this house was no longer the sanctum of privacy it had been intended to be. Tall fences now surrounded the property on every side. An inner fence now surrounded the house itself and its immediate grounds. What, I and my brother wondered from my bedroom in one of the latter-day McMansions now surrounding it, went on in there? Why were its occupants, whoever they were, so adamant about preventing us from seeing it? All we could see from our window were lights from two of the six second-story windows in that house. We thought we could hear music from there. Ordinary top 40 music. But from all the way over there, for us to almost hear it from where we were, meant it must have been really loud. As if whoever was in there was trying to cover up some other noise. Our parents wouldn’t tell us if they knew anything about that house or its occupants.